Dazadi Leverages BigCommerce to Surpass $100M Revenue

$22M

10,000+

8

in annual revenue

SKUs all managed in-house

years on the IR 1000

Share

Family owned and operated Dazadi is today a $22M success story

But having first launched in the aftermath of the DotCom bubble burst, surviving through the recession and tossing their hands up at webstore marketing due high costs and low conversions on an open source platform –– the road to that success has been long and the lessons plentiful.

For years, the Dazadi team focused their efforts on Amazon –– where marketing costs remained low and selling turned into a marketplace science.

In 2015, the 13-year-old company decided to turn their focus back again to their own webstore in addition to their Amazon channel sales. The reasoning was obvious: Dazadi needed to be able to market to customers and increase loyalty and AOV, something not possible on Amazon.

The team knew their open source platform wasn’t working for them. They needed a serious upgrade.

But where does a $22M brand go to grow sales to $500M and beyond? That’s where BigCommerce comes in.

BigCommerce was the only platform that had the features built-in that would allow us to build out what we needed in a very short and easy manner.Jason Boyce, co-founder and CEO of Dazadi.

Shifting from open-source to SaaS

As told to BigCommerce by Jason Boyce, co-founder and CEO of Dazadi.

When we started the company in 2002, we were using OSCommerce, an open source platform. We had our own development team and had iterated on the platform for more than a decade. But no matter what we did, it still wasn't as feature rich as we needed it to be.

As a result, we became focused almost entirely on the online marketplaces, selling on Amazon, Sears, and Wal-Mart. Those provided a lot of growth for us. Plus, we didn't have to do any of the marketing.

But we also knew that anything could happen on a marketplace like Amazon and that in order to really add value to Dazadi, we needed to be growing our customer base on Dazadi.com and driving more sales there.

We knew it was going to take us 5 years to get caught up with everyone else if we went with open source or custom build. We needed a platform that had everything we needed right then already built-in, and one with extensible APIs we could connect to our home grown ERP system.

That meant we were looking at a SaaS solution.

Shopify Plus didn’t understand complex business needs

As told to BigCommerce by Jason Boyce, co-founder and CEO of Dazadi.

We started off looking at Shopify Plus, and that’s when I became very frustrated. We set up several meetings with them and to every question we asked, their answer was always, “We think we have a plug-in for that.”

So, I told my team to research all the plugins we’d need and that’s when we realized that researching plug-ins was going to be more work than if we just built a platform ourselves. We were going to have to identify the plug-in.

Then, we’d have to integrate it. Then, we’d have to test it and make sure it does actually what we want it to do.

Turns out that BigCommerce was the only platform that had the features built-in that would allow us to build out what we needed in a very short and easy manner. It had, I’d estimate, 98% of our long list of needs already built-in.
No one else had it. No one else could do it.

The grown up way to do business

As told to BigCommerce by Jason Boyce, co-founder and CEO of Dazadi.

In fact, I almost hung up on Shopify. It was one of my most frustrating calls.

They just couldn’t understand the freight business. They didn’t understand how people sell furniture online, that our items are big and we needed to be able to offer various shipping options for our customers.

The whole thing was a pretty frustrating sales experience with them. We were trying to find a platform that we want to grow to $100 million, $200 million, $500 million in revenue, and Shopify Plus just didn't get it.

BigCommerce totally got it.

The teams there have already worked with online furniture brands. They knew exactly what we were talking about when it came to freight.

Plus, the platform had the system built in for us to be able to offer freight in –– what we call internally as –– “the grownup way.”

Everyone knows everything about small package shipping because it's easy.

Freight is not easy. The fact that BigCommerce embraced that and had the features built in to allow us to do the complex work, that was the selling point for me.

We were trying to find a platform that we want to grow to $100 million, $200 million, $500 million in revenue, and Shopify Plus just didn't get it.
Jason Boyce, co-founder and CEO of Dazadi.

We had a feature list as long as our arm that we had been going through with all of the other providers and they just didn't offer it or they offered it as a plug-in, and that didn't work for us. BigCommerce had 98% of that long laundry list of features included in the platform.
Jason Boyce, co-founder and CEO of Dazadi.

Diversifying channel revenue to future-proof the business

$22M

10,000+

8

in annual revenue

SKUs all managed in-house

years on the IR 1000

As told to BigCommerce by Jason Boyce, co-founder and CEO of Dazadi.

We think marketplaces are here to stay and we're happy to continue selling on them, but we also really want to create a different and unique kind of buying experience.

One that is more tailored directly to our customer on the BigCommerce platform and on Dazadi.com.

Things happen on marketplaces like Amazon, and the whole time we were selling only on those, we knew that in order to really add value to Dazadi, we needed to be growing our customer base on Dazadi and driving more sales to Dazadi.

Identifying BigCommerce as a front-end platform instead of spending who knows how many hours and years to get caught up was a key decision point. Now we're really focused on marketing and driving sales to the site.

A platform that allows us to build the brand our customers deserve

As told to BigCommerce by Jason Boyce, co-founder and CEO of Dazadi.

We spoke to BigCommerce last and we were really frustrated by that time after trying to talk through things with Shopify Plus.

We had our first meetings with BigCommerce and we were so pleasantly surprised. We had a feature list as long as our arm that we had been going through with all of the other providers and they just didn't offer it or they offered it as a plug-in, and that didn't work for us.

Instead, BigCommerce had 98% of that long laundry list of features included in the platform.

All of that already being built-in meant we could focus on using the API to sync with our ERP, which is the heart of our business. Now that we have the API connection with BigCommerce, now that we've got the right platform, we can scale Dazadi to as big as we need to.

We're even talking about expanding into the EU and other countries. BigCommerce can do that for us.

Ultimately, that’s what we wanted, the ability to finally focus on building the marketing plan that our Dazadi customers and the Dazadi brand deserve.

Don't be afraid to fail

As told to BigCommerce by Jason Boyce, co-founder and CEO of Dazadi.

There's so much information out there now.

Great SaaS providers like BigCommerce come at very cost-effective rates and serve up lots of information and features that newcomers can leverage without having to make those hard mistakes.

But my biggest piece of advice to other online sellers is don’t be afraid of failure.

How you build your sturdy backbone is by making mistakes, learning from them and carrying on. Don't be deterred when you fail, just keep carrying on, and then put things out in the wild to see how it works.